Chapter 1
She’s trying to drive me out of my fucking mind. I know it and she knows it, but just because I haven’t said or done anything in the last three years or so since she started her campaign, she’s grown progressively worse.
I’ve just been biding my time, there was much to consider after all. Not least of all, the affect it would have on her if I took her up on what she was so readily offering.
I’ve known her since she was a kid for fuck sake, and not once in those early days did I even think of her in any other way but as the daughter of one of my closest friends. Then tragedy struck and threw us together in a most unconventional way.
I had been in no way ready to take on the responsibility for a fourteen- year old girl. At twenty-six, I was just hitting my stride in the business world as well as in my private life. Being left with the guardianship of a young girl who’d lost both her parents in one shot hadn’t been anywhere in my life plan.
I’d stepped up to the plate however, and fulfilled the terms of the will. In those first days and weeks after the accident, I’d put my life on hold and taken care of her. Feeling the raw pain that she endured then like a knife through my own heart.
We’d grown closer then during those long trying days and nights when she cried enough to break my heart. When all I could do to ease the pain was rock her in my arms until she fell asleep, too exhausted to do anything else. Of course there was nothing sexual between us, the thought never even crossed my mind. I would’ve been a perverted fuck if it had.
No, in those early days we had just been two people offering each other comfort at a time when our world had been shifted off its axis. Dave had been a good friend and confidant. Even though he’d been older, he’d taken me under his wing when I first joined my family’s business. We’d hit it off from day one, so it wasn’t a stretch for him to introduce me to his wife and their only daughter, the apple of his eye.
***
After many dinners together, and assorted company gatherings where the families were invited to tag along, Isabella and I had grown rather close. She loved regaling me with tales of all the latest shenanigans her and her little girlfriends got up to and nagging me into letting her ride my bike. Something I never did because her dad would’ve skinned me alive if I’d ever let his precious little darling get on the back of my death trap as he liked to call it.
That closeness had only grown in the weeks and months after her parents’ deaths, and I had begun to relax and think that maybe this guardian deal wouldn’t be so hard after all. As long as I stayed on top of her and kept the nightmares at bay and saw to it that she had as normal a childhood as possible, then I shouldn’t fuck her up anymore than the average kid was.
It was months later that I realized something had shifted; her attitude towards me had changed. At first, I put it down to the gratitude of an impressionable young girl, whose emotions were askew because we’d grown so close out of necessity. But as time wore on, I grew to believe it was a little bit more than that.
I’d distanced myself in the only way I knew how without hurting her too much. After all, I was a grown man and she was just a mere child. I thought for sure that with time her little schoolgirl crush would go away.
I started dating again, though I didn’t keep a stable of women in and out of the home that I now shared with her, but I’ve always been a man of very strong appetites. So when I was sure she was out of the woods, I’d climbed back into the saddle.
I knew she hated it, thought it was because she was afraid I would leave her. But as a man who prides himself on knowing women, I picked up soon enough on what was really going on. Short of sending her away to boarding school, which would’ve hurt me to do as much as it would’ve hurt her. The only thing left was to make a rift of sorts between us.
I’m not sure how well that had worked though, because she only seemed to get worst as time went on. Then she started to grow up and I was the one in trouble. I’m not sure when exactly it was that I started thinking differently towards her, but I know whenever it was, she was too young.
That just made me more of a bastard or so she likes to claim. We’d gone from being free and relaxed in each other’s space, to barely coexisting under the same roof. I hated like fuck to see that great divide growing wider and wider but it’s what was best for her.
Even if she’d been older when this all started, she wasn’t for me. She was a gently bred and reared socialite type. The women I took to my bed were a little gritty and a lot tough. They had to be to handle the shit I expected when I put them under me.